Quotes from Martha Gellhorn

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining,... Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives.

I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.

After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.

If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy.

From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.

But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.

It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.